I Went Six Months Without Google Search : A #Nofilter Analysis of Open AI’s SearchGPT for ChatGPT

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When SearchGPT launched on ChatGPT, I dove into the deep end from the starting bell. At first, it was a slow clunky replacement for Bing (my previous 12-15yr mostly default). It also was pretty much a clone of what Bing was doing with its AI “best guess” overview. At the launch, I was very skeptical, but it would surprise me with dead on answers much of the time, and that accuracy saved me hours-upon-hours of searching. So I stuck with it and decided to use it long term.

Trying it, was not without blowback from many friends in the industry. Like that massive horde that said “we are leaving Facebook” only to post a week later on Facebook, they thought I’d come crawling back to the age-old Serps begging for forgiveness. Fact is, six months later Google looks tired, old, and difficult to use. Google’s AI overviews are often flatout wrong, difficult to navigate, require clicking on an accordian to the see result, and most often are just in the way of the real answer you are looking to find. In fairness, they seem that way, because OpenAI’s web search has become that fast and good at finding answers. Sure there are specific offereings that OpenAi is lacking (images, maps, news), but overall, SearchGPT is my daily driver.

Just before it flipped to subscriber access, there was noticeable change in the quality of responses. I’m not sure which of the models OpenAI released, but it was obvious that the answers were faster, more accurate, and easier to surf the supporting links.

It is easy to query SearchGPT (ummm Huh? So is that what we agree we are calling it?)

Please bear with me on a deep aside that has been perking for a few months:

“Love ya OpenAI, but dang you need to hire a branding expert to start naming your models and services. The “awe shit, we can’t think of anything, so lets call it Model 4.1 open plus enhanced” days of doing business are over. Please, bite-the-bullet, bring in an expert branding guru.”

I’ve got a love-it / don’t-care-for-it relationship with conversational search. We’ll get the bad below, but the good part is that you can refine your search and SearchGPT remembers the context of the search. You don’t need to retype the entire prompt query to continue digging deeper into the topic.

Where it really shines better than anything Google or Bing have put out, is in deeper research prompts/queries. I’ve compared Google and SearchGPT at least 100 times. The ability of SearchGPT to retain context shortens longer search processes. Google is getting better at this – apparently launching something new soon – but SearchGPT is currently the context king.

What is also cool, is that ChatGPT and SearchGPT support a very thourough list of advanced search operators (it appears they support the entire list that Bing does).

The jury is way out on Conversation Search with regard to navigational queries. Call me an SEO old goat, but keyword searching for nav queries just makes sense. The last thing I want to do is more freakin typing to get to a nav query response that should take a couple of words. In that sense, I reject the entire idea of Conversational Search used for navigation as step backwards.

That isn’t to say, conversational prompting isn’t awesome. I use it daily. Even to get ideas for this very post, that turned into a long back-n-forth with ChatGPT that was both appropriate, and rewarding and that gave me a bunch of ideas I’d not thought of yet. Just saying that we’ve been programmed to type in HotMail and expect a link – not a five paragraph treatise on the history of free web email. In fact, that is the one bad part about SearchGPT – it often just too wordy for it’s own good.

My usage is almost exclusively on desktop. The times that I do use it on my phone are frustrating. On Android, the ChatGPT interface is confusing, slow, and laggy. Every time I use it, I am “are you listening now” and trying to talk to a dead screen. I end up opening the keyboard and just use the ‘talk to the keyboard voice to text’ feature that is easier to use.

Using SearchGPT from the browser on Android is easier, but the speed of response leaves a little to be desired. It is also tough on the phone because there is ‘text overkill’. The responses are too wordy. Most often on phone, I am looking for a nav link, or a quick response and ChatGPT search spews out a slow five paragraphs when a simple link would do. Meanwhile, wifey has the answer on her Iphone and Google combo before ChatGPT responds.

I do believe that they will get this figured out. ChatGPT with SearchGPT is a very effective combo to be the perfect assistant that puts Siri to shame. The biggest problem is speed. Using it from the browser, brings up the the old problem that ChatGPT is just too wordy : I want a sentence response and ChatGPT gives me two paragraphs to wade through. To make matters worse, I often am after a website link to a restaurant, or a store site and again, ChatGPT gives me the Wikipedia like background.

News is really a sore spot with SearchGPT. Real time info is still better surfaced on Google News or Bing News. Mean while, Google News has become a maddening and manipulative assault on your surfing via paywalls, cookie walls, popups, subscribe prompts, and ad spam that it is becoming unusable for many. I was on there 10mins ago to look and the top 5 stories and national news were paywalled. Utterly useless.  After using it multiple times a day for two decades, I rarely go there any more.

That said, SearchGPT isn’t perfect either, and you would think that  with their firehose feed from Bing, they should be able to bring up more real times info, but it just doesn’t. Only specific queries about known news stories seem to work.

On the other hand, compare the following two screen shots (click to open). Googles response is 100% all Google spam above the huge fold, and SearchGPT is spot-on appropriate and what I was looking to find. This is a very common refrain: Google is Google Property Spam du jour – and ChatGPT is dead-solid-perfect. Compare:

 

Google “stock market today”

SearchGPT “stock market today”

 

Boy, we’ve gotten good listings in ChatGPT and referenced links in SearchGPT, and just isn’t producing the referrals like we think they should (go figure sherlock). Lets pause for a PSA reminder that tracking referrals from ChatGPT/SearchGPT is not a straight ahead proposition.

OpenAI reportedly built their first few models with the Common Crawl database. That changed in 2023 when they started to run a whole series of bots. Be sure to check your tracking to make sure that they are hitting your site. See our previous article on OpenAI Spiders.

Now, even though we know OpenAI’s SearchGPT (the little search button in a ChatGPT) prompt, is powered by Bing, there are now results showing in SearchGPT responses, that are not in Bing. One place this is really noticeable and trackable, is in posts from Reddit. We tested by leaving some links is older Reddit posts, only to have them surfaced in SearchGPT, less than 4 hours later – yes 4 hours later. Those same posts were – apparently – not in Bing yet. Hello!? Beats me, but we proved it several times in a row. We have reached out to OpenAI for comment, and not heard back.

The only time I go to another search engine is for nonweb utilities like Bing’s impressive image offerings, and Google’s impressive Maps (still their best product ever). Even as much as I despise Google New’s annoying and frustrating a user experience is, I try to take a look once every couple of weeks just to stay in the loop on mainstream news. Other that, I rarely use the web search features of Google or Bing. There is just something about Googles “in your face” AI Overviews that are so disruptive to finding anything. The funny thing, is that Google recently announced that they increased searches 20% last year and the only thing I could think was, well duh they increased! Everyone has to search twice to find anything once because the damn AI slop, the Google YouTube, and Reddit spam are in the way!

Meanwhile, over at Bing, they seem to have figured out the balance right between the real Serps and AI (whew, took long enough), but I still want links to where they found the information they are shoving in my face.

ChatGPT does not leave me hanging without and answer too many times (certainly not as many as Google AI overviews do). That alone is the rub: finding what I am looking for faster. Google however, throws and answer at the top of your search – disrupting 25years of usage experience and leaving the user to decide if they can trust the AI Overview or just scroll down to the real answer – the serps. Using Google search today feels like when Microsoft force fed us all Internet Explorer – it just feels dishonest.

• A tabbed breakdown of different sections: news, images, video, web, etc.
• More inline links to reference material. I do find msyself sneaking to bing to search for something that ChatGPT referenced, but didn’t give me the link.
• Less wordy, more direct responses.

added: Nice to see Sam offer a vision for a new naming convention going forward:

OPENAI ROADMAP UPDATE FOR GPT-4.5 and GPT-5:

We want to do a better job of sharing our intended roadmap, and a much better job simplifying our product offerings.

We want AI to “just work” for you; we realize how complicated our model and product offerings have gotten.

We hate…

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 12, 2025